So Mythic agreed with "Why do we PvP?" post and realized that all this virtual world nonsense and character advancement is only getting into the way of a good PvP game. So they are taking the Warhammer Online engine and are creating Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes with it. A lobby based, Free2Play, fantasy battle game with 3 factions.

In hindsight it appears obvious that this is the game they should have released in 2008. They would have become silly rich by now if they had done so. Instead they grafted an inferior WoW clone nobody liked on the fantasy battle game people actually wanted to play, wasted millions, and are widely regarded as a failure. It is good that they've realized now where the actual strength of their game is, even if by now the lobby-based battle game market is much more crowded. Nevertheless I expect WARWoH to do well, and to make the original WAR obsolete to the point of it closing down in a few years.
- posted by Tobold Stoutfoot @ 8:31 AM Permanent Link
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Totally agreed. Although it's sounding like there won't be three factions per se, just three sides in the battles, and you'll be able to play on whatever team with whatever character you're playing.

As much as I've applied the hatestick to WAR since its ruinous collapse, I'm surprisingly intrigued by this, and plan to give it a whirl.

The thing is, you're right about PVE as well. It's not that most people don't want to play PVP MMOs, it's that most players don't want to play MMOs at all. WoW is this strange aberration that has warped the market with an unrealistic expectation of the audience, but it's morphed into basically a game matching lobby with a little prequel game because it's players don't want to play an MMO.

It would do the industry well to follow Mythic's lead and just get rid of the world for these mass market least common denominator games. Leave MMO where it belongs as a niche with real "massivity."

Having said all that, there are dozens if not hundreds of reasons that War was a disaster. It wasn't just the comingling of a horribly dull PVE game with a PVP lobby system.

I wouldn't take having the same PvP view as Mythic as a compliment, but that's just me.

And WoH has about as good a shot at being successful as WoW does of getting back to 12m subs.

LoL being the next game to clone is going to be entertaining though. PvE devs are going to learn very quickly that creating a solo script is one thing, designing a solid PvP game is just 'slightly' more difficult.

Blizzard needs to acknowledge that it's impossible to simultaneously balance both their PvP game and their MMO/Raid game; it cannot be done and so they need to completely separate the two facets of WoW.

There needs to be a WoW:Arena game, and a WoW:Raid game, and while both "games" may feature the same classes any changes made to the WoW:Arena classes will not affect their WoW:Raid counterparts, and vice versa. And if it turns out that some Raid classes are better at World PvP than others, and they will be, then people need to accept that that's just how it is, which they won't. However, despite the inevitable bitching & moaning on the forums about Class X pwning me in World PvP, Blizzard should make no attempt to balance the WoW:Raid classes for PvP because that's not the primary objective of the WoW:Raid game; those classes should be balanced for Raiding and that's it.

PvE devs are going to learn very quickly that creating a solo script is one thing, designing a solid PvP game is just 'slightly' more difficult.

I disagree. World of Tanks is up to 5 million players, League of Legends has 3 millions, Heroes of Newerth has 300k. Battlefield Heroes has 7 million players, and the list goes on and on.

I agree that it is impossible to make a solid PvP MMORPG, in fact I don't know one that would qualify for that distinction. But a solid lobby-based PvP game appears to be easy, with lots of success stories and very few reports of failed attempts.

I was talking MMO PvP games. We can start with Doom and go on up if we want to talk successful PvP games. That said, there have already been a few failed MOBA games, and I expect that trend to accelerate. We'll see if Valve can get it right.

'Successful' PvP MMOs depend on your definition. I would call games like early UO, AC, DAoC, EVE, and DF successful. But if success is measured in "did you hit 10m subs", well, that list gets real short.

BTW, LoL is a little bit bigger than 3m players, hence being the new FOTM to copy.

Yes, except for DF. But you wanted "solid PvP games", and in the successful games more than half of the population didn't or doesn't engage in PvP. You might as well call WoW a PvP game (which probably at any given night has more people engaging in PvP than all of those games on your list together).

"and in the successful games more than half of the population didn't or doesn't engage in PvP"

And? A good PvP MMO is not JUST good because of the PvP itself, but what the PvP does for everything else. EVE having the best economic game in the genre is due, in large part, because of how PvP works. Just because Billy the Trader does not PvP does not mean he would benefit from PvP being removed from EVE.

"except for DF"

The game has been out 2+ years, it's dev team has expanded, it has not gone F2P or closed servers (they added a second 6+ months after release), it's not pulled a 180 in design, and it's set for a relaunch/massive update/whatever the hell DF2.0 turns out to be 'soon'.

For the players playing it, and the company behind it, how is it not successful? As I've said a million times, what exactly are those 100+ servers WoW has doing for you in-game?

Oh yes, they attract gold farmers, increase the likelihood of your account being hacked, and create the worst community in the genre.

For the players playing it, and the company behind it, how is it not successful?

So if I made a MMORPG that only has 1 player, and that 1 player doesn't quit, nor do I stop running the MMORPG, the game is successful by your definition?

Sorry, nobody else shares that opinion. Darkfall took forever to produce, was long considered vaporware, then finally released in an extremely buggy state, peaked at 25k subscribers before falling under 20k, and is now going to wipe or semi-wipe all characters. It is the definition of the extreme niche game, not a success.

You're just changing the definition of what success is every time the circumstances change. When EVE was still growing, growth was cited as a factor of success. Now EVE has peaked and Darkfall as well, suddenly the definition changed again.

Sorry, but those of us who aren't paid to promote Darkfall don't consider a game with just 20k subscribers a success. Especially not if it is so fucked up that they have to wipe their skill system and reset all characters.

But Rift is not an MMO. It's another solo game with visual game matching lobby like WoW. It's had almost everything massive beaten out of it with a stick. People had to find groups, actually interact with other people. They went ballistic and demanded another WoW clone looking for grief tool that would instantly match them with human piloted bots.